Troubleshooting a Slow Server - SBS 2008

Speed issues are always difficult to troubleshoot because modern computers do so much, this is especially true of a server and doubly so of an SBS server.  So when a customer recently said that their software was running slowly where did I start?

Task Manager
Open up task manager and have a look at those readings under the performance tab.  Is memory usage high, is CPU usage high, is disk utilization high or is network utilization high?  These would give a good indication of where to start.  CPU usage was very low <10% but all other figures were 20% or higher.

Performance Monitor
Type perfmon /report in the "run" box and it will run a quick 1 minute diagnosis of the computer.  It will give green, amber and red lights depending on what it considers to be of concern.  This may not lead you to the cause of the problem in hand but it seemed like as good a place as any to get some more info.  The problem with this approach is that it may indicate something as ok when it is performing much worse than usual so it is important to have a baseline performance benchmark.  I did not, but I had a feeling an SBS server with 5 users should not have so much disk IO caused by 1 or 2 standard server processes.

Memory Usage
8Gb seemed like a perfectly reasonable amount of memory for an SBS 2008 server, but given the greater than 90% usage, I thought I'd try to bring it down a bit.  Open up Task Manager and under processes select View and choose columns, then select PID.  Sort the processes by Memory usage and I found sqlserver right at the top.  Then open a command prompt (type cmd in the run box) and type at the prompt tasklist /svc |find "sql"
When the command returns it will display several processes each with their PID, now compare the PID to the one at the top of the list in Task Manager and see if you can find the exact database name from the other list.

SBS Monitoring seems to be one of the chief culprits of memory usage so I restricted this to under 1Gb
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/smallbusinessserver/thread/d195baac-da8b-4387-9079-c55d5e1879b4
http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2009/07/14/sbs-2008-console-may-take-too-long-to-display-alerts-and-security-statuses-display-not-available-or-crash.aspx

I have kind of run out of time to get this blog finished properly and I'd rather publish it than leave it here languishing, so perhaps I'll update it when I get chance but for now, I hope this helps.  If you'd like to discuss it with me then please contact The PC Support Group on +44 (0) 845 2233116.

Forward Emails for a User who has Left

Suppose a user has left a small business (or even a large one) and their manager would like to ensure that no emails are accidentally sent to this user and thereby missed.  To do this in SBS 2011 (Exchange Server 2010) do the following:
Open: Exchange Management Console from the Start Menu.
Expand: Recipient Configuration
Select: Mailbox
Double-click: The user who's left
Select: The "Mail Flow Settings" tab
Double-click: Delivery Options
Check: "Forward to:" and then enter the email address of the intended recipient.

To have emails forward to an non-company email address, this will need to be entered as a contact in:
Recipient Configuration > Mail Contact.

SBS 2011 ran out of disk space

So the other day a customer phoned to say that they hadn't received any emails all morning.  Upon closer inspection the Exchange Information Store service had been creating log files like there's no tomorrow.

A tool I use all the time is Windirstat - it should come as standard with Windows - this led me straight to the culprit.

To disable logging, go into the IIS Manager -> Right-click on Websites and select Properties-> Uncheck “Enable Logging”

For help with this or any other issue, please contact The PC Support Group on 0845 2233116, or visit our website at http://www.pcsupportgroup.com

Android Mail deletes email from Exchange server

So having recently migrated our mail over to Office-365, I was looking forward to using Exchange Active-Sync on my Android phone.  The setup was fairly painless albeit a bit involved.  There is a video guide here which I used to set mine up: http://www.gsu.edu/ist/email/configure-android.html

However, having set up active-sync I found that my phone was running out of storage space, even though I'd set it up to download only the last day's messages.  So I deleted some messages to free up some space.  I was surprised to find that they'd been deleted from my desktop computer also and were in Deleted items.  This is perhaps useful behaviour for some people, as you have all email accounts with the same emails in them showing which one's you've read etc.  However, phone's do have the issue of storage space which other devices generally do not.  So what's the solution:

- Some people said K-9 mail app - but this doesn't support Office-365 - I tried.
- Some people said Touchdown app - but this costs £12.99 - apparently it does work - I've not tried it though.

For the time being I'm going to procrastinate over this one, delete an App or two and either hold off until my phone gets upgraded in about two months, or just pay the £12.99.  I have to say, as good as the HTC Wildfire is, I am constantly getting low storage space warnings on it which drive me crazy!